What Scares the New Atheists
John Gray
March 3, 2015
The Guardian
[In this extended essay published in
The Guardian John Gray focuses upon the inevitable amorality of atheism. Since atheism has no foundation for any morality, what moral precepts its does advocate have no defendable foundation. Atheist moral precepts are wishful thinking. This has led atheists down through the years to adhere to a bunch of conflicting moralisms, moral positions, and moralities. We have broken the essay down into shorter segments and will publish over consecutive days. Ed.]
In 1929, the Thinker’s Library, a series established by the
Rationalist Press Association to advance secular thinking and counter
the influence of religion in Britain, published an English translation
of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s 1899 book
The Riddle of the Universe.
Celebrated as “the German Darwin”, Haeckel was one of the most
influential public intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century; The Riddle of the Universe sold half a million copies
in Germany alone, and was translated into dozens of other languages.
Hostile to Jewish and Christian traditions,
Haeckel
devised his own “religion of science” called Monism, which incorporated
an anthropology that divided the human species into a hierarchy of
racial groups. Though he died in 1919, before the Nazi Party had been
founded, his ideas, and widespread influence in Germany, unquestionably
helped to create an intellectual climate in which policies of racial
slavery and genocide were able to claim a basis in science.
The Thinker’s Library also featured works by Julian Huxley, grandson of TH Huxley, the Victorian biologist who was known as
“Darwin’s bulldog”
for his fierce defence of evolutionary theory. A proponent of
“evolutionary humanism”, which he described as “religion without
revelation”, Julian Huxley shared some of Haeckel’s views, including
advocacy of
eugenics.
In 1931, Huxley wrote that there was “a certain amount of evidence that
the negro is an earlier product of human evolution than the Mongolian
or the European, and as such might be expected to have advanced less,
both in body and mind”. Statements of this kind were then commonplace:
there were many in the secular intelligentsia – including HG Wells, also
a contributor to the Thinker’s Library – who looked forward to a time
when “backward” peoples would be remade in a western mould or else
vanish from the world.
But by the late 1930s, these views were becoming suspect: already in
1935, Huxley admitted that the concept of race was “hardly definable in
scientific terms”. While he never renounced eugenics, little was heard
from him on the subject after the second world war. The science that
pronounced western people superior was bogus – but what shifted Huxley’s
views wasn’t any scientific revelation: it was the rise of Nazism,
which revealed what had been done under the aegis of Haeckel-style
racism.
It has often been observed that
Christianity
follows changing moral fashions, all the while believing that it stands
apart from the world. The same might be said, with more justice, of the
prevalent version of atheism. If an earlier generation of unbelievers
shared the racial prejudices of their time and elevated them to the
status of scientific truths, evangelical atheists do the same with the
liberal values to which western societies subscribe today – while
looking with contempt upon “backward” cultures that have not abandoned
religion.
The racial theories promoted by atheists in the past have been
consigned to the memory hole – and today’s most influential atheists
would no more endorse racist biology than they would be seen following
the guidance of an astrologer. But they have not renounced the
conviction that human values must be based in science; now it is liberal
values which receive that accolade. There are disputes, sometimes
bitter, over how to define and interpret those values, but their
supremacy is hardly ever questioned. For 21st century atheist
missionaries, being liberal and scientific in outlook are one and the
same.
It’s a reassuringly simple equation. In fact there are no reliable
connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and
liberal values. When organised as a movement and backed by the power of
the state, atheist ideologies have been an integral part of despotic
regimes that also claimed to be based in science, such as the former
Soviet Union. Many rival moralities and political systems – most of
them, to date, illiberal – have attempted to assert a basis in science.
All have been fraudulent and ephemeral. Yet the attempt continues in
atheist movements today, which claim that liberal values can be
scientifically validated and are therefore humanly universal.
Fortunately, this type of atheism isn’t the only one that has ever
existed. There have been many modern atheisms, some of them more cogent
and more intellectually liberating than the type that makes so much
noise today. Campaigning atheism is a missionary enterprise, aiming to
convert humankind to a particular version of unbelief; but not all
atheists have been interested in propagating a new gospel, and some have
been friendly to traditional faiths.
Evangelical atheists today view liberal values as part of an emerging
global civilisation; but not all atheists, even when they have been
committed liberals, have shared this comforting conviction.
Atheism
comes in many irreducibly different forms, among which the variety
being promoted at the present time looks strikingly banal and parochial.
